Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (30 page)

The negative relationship between juvenile incarceration and subsequent employment affects not only individuals but entire communities. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that incarcerating large numbers of young people from a particular neighborhood has
“a negative effect on the economic well-being of their communities. Places that rely most heavily on incarceration reduce the employment opportunities in their communities compared to places that deal with crime by means other than incarceration.”

The national tendency to rely most heavily on incarceration in poor neighborhoods of color creates a vicious cycle for the youth who grow up in, and return to, these communities.
“Areas with the most rapidly rising rates of incarceration,” according to the same research, “are areas in which youths, particularly African-American youths, have had the worst earnings and employment experience.”

The crooked bottom line? Unemployment leads to incarceration, which leads to unemployment, which leads to incarceration—a cycle that buffets those most likely to face job discrimination to begin with.

Perhaps this despair-inducing cycle had something to do with why David found the anger management class such a bitter pill to swallow. It wasn't just that he had the curriculum memorized, having been through similar courses repeatedly, starting at age twelve. The problem, he explained, was that he was angry for a
reason
. And that reason—economic desperation and the helplessness he felt to escape it by legal means—was the same at twenty-two as it had been at twelve. Swallowing his anger would not put food on the table.

Locked up for the first time at the age of twelve, David had spent nearly half his life to date behind bars, only to find himself, post-release, facing the very dilemma that had propelled him into delinquency to begin with. He was broke—survival broke—and he could not get a job.

David is the oldest of four children raised by a single mother. His anger was born early on, from doing without and feeling helpless to do a thing
about it. “You ain't making it. You're barely getting school clothes, and once you get older . . . you hear from your peers, ‘You're dirty,' or ‘You keep wearing the same thing.' So that starts putting in your head, ‘I want to hustle.' ”

Seeing his mother struggle was particularly hard to handle. “She cared, but as a single mother, she can only do so much. I was getting tired of her having to ask people for stuff.”

David was still in grade school when he took it on himself to help provide for his own needs and those of his family. “In my environment, you can do that,” he explained. “Where I'm from, you can do it at twelve. . . . You can't really get a job at that age—you're too young. [So] you gonna hustle. You gonna rob.”

Later on, locked up in a series of juvenile institutions, David was offered a different lens on the world, and his own place within it. Crime, he was taught—even what felt like a crime of survival—was not inevitable; it was a
choice
. He was accountable for his actions, no matter the circumstance. The good news, he was promised, was that making better choices would lead to better outcomes.

Over time, David accepted—even internalized—this ethos. He has not yet given up on it, but his post-prison experience has made it hard to keep the faith. With every “good choice” he makes, each job application he seeks out and submits, comes not only rejection but the same disheartening message: not “Sorry kid—keep trying,” but “sorry, kid—don't bother.” Once they learned about his criminal record, it seemed to David, potential employers made it clear not just that he was out of luck this time around, but that he was out of the running before the race even began. He was trying to stay hopeful, or at least patient, but with each rejection he felt more like the desperate, unemployable twelve-year-old who got locked up the first time than the new man his stack of certificates attested he had become.

The “post-prison punishment” young people describe comes in many forms, but our widespread unwillingness to offer a second chance in the form of a job is among the most insidious. It reveals the gaping hole in the story we tell ourselves: at bottom, we do
not
believe that reformatories reform. Those young people who walk out the gates and into a wall learn that “paying their debt to society” is a fool's errand. That debt, many
learn, will be with them forever, accruing compound interest and blocking their prospects everywhere they turn.

The young man rejected from more jobs than he can count comes face-to-face with a cruel reality: our nation—founded on a belief in new beginnings—does not believe in the possibility of redemption, at least not for all. The scarlet
C
, mark of the convict, can never be erased.

Because David was charged as a juvenile, there was light at the end of the tunnel: once he was off probation, he could petition to have his record sealed and then renew his job search without the barrier of the “ex-con” label. The problem was the distance of that light. He had three full years of probation ahead of him, longer than he could get by without a source of income. A different kind of kid might see that as a setup.

The temptation of quick money had not dissipated, David admitted. It assailed him “every day.” But he had not succumbed, he said adamantly, and did not intend to.

What kept him afloat was his closest relationships. “When I start feeling that way, I call my girlfriend or a friend. Or I call my mother, and say, ‘Ma, I'm tired. I'm tired of not being able to get a job.' She's still getting help from welfare. I'm the oldest son, so to see my mother still struggling after so many years—I mean, what's next? I'm tempted every day to get back out there and get some fast money, but I'm not about to go back out there. I look at the risks:
I'm about to leave my family again. They're gonna be struggling worse. I'm about to do some more time. This time I can never see the streets again
.”

So David counts to ten, and he calls, and he breathes, and he waits. Three years is a long time, but eventually he will be off probation. After that, under D.C. law, he must wait two more before he can petition to have his juvenile record sealed.
Then
, he believes—he has to believe—he will find work and begin his new life.

Until then, one wonders how exactly he is expected to manage. No matter how deeply he breathes, he cannot live on air.

The myriad practical challenges young returnees face—from the quest for work and housing to the rules and requirements of probation—are only the beginning. There is also the internal battle: the struggle to reclaim their humanity after the psychological conditioning that prison life entails.
Will has struggled with shaking the old rules and rebuilding himself. “The skills you learn in jail to survive are the opposite,” he explained, of those likely to lead to success on the outside, whether in college, at work, or in personal relationships.

A true Californian with a multiethnic background that spans several continents, a dean's list college student with a prestigious scholarship, and a loyal ally to old friends who have not left the 'hood, Will fits in seamlessly wherever he goes while maintaining an unmistakable sense of himself. Since his release, Will has been successful by just about any measure. On the inside, however, he remains conflicted: saddled, he said, with habits of mind that got him through the years in the California Youth Authority but now just get in his way.

Fifteen the day he entered the Youth Authority, will was twenty-one by the time he was released—officially a man. On the outside, six years had passed, but for Will it felt as if time had frozen. “I thought everything would be the same,” he recalled.

His first weeks of freedom were a time of disillusionment. When he tried to reconnect with old friends, he discovered that many had moved on without him. Many of those released from juvenile prisons, he pointed out, enter as adolescents and emerge as adults from systems that can keep them until their twenty-first or even twenty-fifth birthday, depending on state law. These are the very years when most young lawbreakers who are
not
incarcerated grow out of delinquency.

Those who are locked up during this period lose years that are crucial both developmentally and pragmatically. Late adolescence and early adulthood are periods of rapid brain growth, when the adult brain—with its more sophisticated capacity for decision making, independent thinking, and looking toward the future—develops, a process that is profoundly affected by a young person's environment. Rather than spending these years laying the foundation for life as an adult, young prisoners live them in a state of suspended animation, where the focus on survival dwarfs all thought of the future, and the otherwise gradual transition from dependence to self-sufficiency is undermined by the enforced dependency of prison life.

“Juveniles and young adults may be incarcerated during a key developmental phase of adolescence,” according to the
Journal of Juvenile Justice.
“Lacking the necessary skills to cope with adult responsibilities when they are released, many youth face unemployment, school re-enrollment challenges, and homelessness upon release.”

“The transition getting out is actually harder than being in jail, in my opinion,” said will. “They bring you in as a youngster and let you go as an adult, so you've never had the opportunity to be independent. You go in at fifteen, sixteen, you're still dependent on your family. You go into a system and you're dependent on
them
for food and shelter. Then all of a sudden they let you out. I was twenty-one when they let me out. So at twenty-one, now all of a sudden you're a grown man and you got to learn all these things for yourself.”

Dating, for example—the romantic relationships young people may pine for in prison—can seem infinitely complex. It's not just the stigma of a criminal record. There are also all those missed years to make up for. “You're in an environment that is all males,” Will explained. “Then when you get out and try to connect with a woman on an intimate level, it's tough.” He doesn't just mean emotionally. Even the practical aspects have to be relearned—or learned for the first time.

Will was twenty-one and had not been on a date since he was fifteen. “I was a kid,” he said, laughing a bit at his adolescent innocence. Back then, “all you had to do was ask a girl, ‘Will you go with me?' and it'll be all right. But now if I ask a girl, ‘Would you go with me?' she'll be like, ‘Where, and in what car?' ”

“It's not about just your relationship with the girl anymore,” he has since learned. “It's about what you can offer her. When you're grown, it's like, ‘Does he live by himself? Does he have a car? Does he have money?' ” Few recently released young men can answer these questions in the affirmative.

Even worse than the difficulty connecting with others was the unsettling sense that Will had somehow lost touch with
himself
, that prison had transformed him in fundamental ways
. Walk a straight line, be quiet, if you want to earn your privileges.
A quick study, Will found he had internalized all too well the ethos of submission and conformity that prison life demanded.

“Here,” on the other hand—by which he means both the whole of the world, where he has had to learn anew to make his way, and, particularly,
the unfamiliar environment of a college campus—“you have to speak out to get what you need.”

Will understood this intellectually, but overcoming years of indoctrination and habit was another matter. “It's not just the isolation,” he explained. “It's the personality traits. I developed traits in there that are not useful to me out here.”

He spoke, for example, of the erosion of individuality in an environment where there is “just one set of rules to follow from someone I don't even know. . . .
Talk is dead
. With no
why
. I am very inquisitive. ‘Why do I have to be quiet?' You can't even ask. If you tell me, ‘Will, it's okay to use the bathroom,' that's what I go off of. Why wasn't it okay half an hour ago?”

Even when the guards were not watching and gauging his behavior, other young wards were. As a result, Will said, “Now, sometimes I don't feel motivated unless I am feeling watched, to where, if I am by myself, I will be real lazy. In order for me to be motivated to act, I need to feel like I am being watched.”

“To this day,” he acknowledged, being alone was hard for him, as was acting independently—much as he had ached for that very independence during the years behind bars. “I don't feel right unless I have someone telling me, ‘This is the right thing to do.' Someone who's watching me. Am I walking in a straight line? Even when I am by myself, I am wondering how do I look, am I doing the right thing?” Will said, describing the sense of “constant surveillance” that his experience behind bars had etched into his consciousness.

“Even to this day, I really care what people think of me,” he revealed—a concern that his direct and confident manner masks entirely—“and I don't even know why.”

The mind games and power plays that are part of getting by in prison, Will believes, eroded his ability to take others at face value. “When people are being nice to me now, or trying to be courteous, I always get kind of—like if people offer me something, there has to be an ulterior motive. That's another internalized idea I got from jail. I can't just receive something from somebody as a gift without feeling like there's something attached to it. ‘what do you want from me?' I don't trust genuine giving.”